Janusz from the Kray forum has posted here before. He knows what Podium does, and he has helped me with the presets.

The biggest and insurmountable difference is complexity of materials in Lightwave. That has nodes and procedural materials as well as pure textures. It means that you can get a lot more subtlety in your material settings.

Yes with the Preset editor you can get a lot more control than with our presets. In that regard, yes, you have access to more complexity.

Materials are the big problem though, and I don't see us being able to introduce a node-based materials editor. Apart from the actual UI complexity (which comes from Lightwave) which we would have to duplicate, the whole principle of creating materials is simply much more involved and difficult.

There are more Kray features we can use ( like instancing for example) that haven't been implemented and the new Kray 3 looks very impressive, and is even faster.

I've spoken to Janusz at length about Podium, Kray and their differences.

However, the high presets were modified by me following a long discussion with him on Skype, so in terms of quality, those presets are kind of his.

The 1.0.5 series of presets Jure helped me with.

There are things that LW does differently, and Janusz's way of working is more complex than most Podium users would be inclined to do. For example he puts invisible LEMs outside the windows and below the ceilings, and always sets the photon multiplier to 1 (this is a parameter that boosts the strength of the photons, for interiors, to keep things simple, I set this to 2) and he has lower settings for the input tonemapper.

This means that his lighting is rather different to ours, and he always uses After Effects (not Photoshop) for post-processing. He thinks it'a much better tool.

The point is that he has developed what to novices is a complex workflow, but because it's second nature to him, it's fast and efficient and delivers fabulous results.

Similarly with Jure's recommendations, we had to modify some things for SketchUp and Podium's way of working.

Janusz spends a lot of time on his materials, and we simply don't have that degree of sophistication in SU or Podium.

If I'm really honest, I don't know how much difference that complexity makes. Janusz's images are amazing, but I don't know how much is down to After Effects, materials or lighting. It may be that you just get a small improvement in each element, but altogether they add up to a much bigger one.

The other things to bear in mind, are that he will tweak the settings slightly for each scene, and he has more experience with this stuff than any of us, and more talent than most

That's great to know a bit about all this stuff and his workflow. As you said Janusz is more experimented and talented than any of us and that is exactly why it could be interesting to see what he can do after applying all his method with a render made in podium.

Understanding that SU Podium must be simple, are you planning to give materials a little more of customization options? It would be very nice to have diffuse, reflectance, transparent, absorption layers or dimensions.__________________Man constructs according to an archetype…This participation by urban cultures in an archetypal model is what gives them their reality and validity.” The Myth of the Eternal Return
by Mircea Eliade

We will probably add more customisation options for materials, but this will most likely be limited to reflection blur and normal/bump maps.
Nothing like you are suggesting because they would add too much complexity.

Well anything new in that matter is good for us. That normal/bump sounds great.

__________________Man constructs according to an archetype…This participation by urban cultures in an archetypal model is what gives them their reality and validity.” The Myth of the Eternal Return
by Mircea Eliade

Matu, you already can define absorption - simply make the DTR sum less than 100. It is very useful for materials such as plastics and rubber.__________________"Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins."
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Thanks Davor, i will look into that and play with it.__________________Man constructs according to an archetype…This participation by urban cultures in an archetypal model is what gives them their reality and validity.” The Myth of the Eternal Return
by Mircea Eliade

The longer answer is that this only relevant to speed, and the question really ought to be, "Is Podium going to get any refinements to improve speed?"

In that respect, the answer is "Yes"

GPU rendering will only come when we change the render engine, as Kray 2.x does not support it. However, there are are numerous things that are being considered to improve render speed further.

Thanks for the reply. I'm happy with the quality of renders it produces, I just have a decent amount of GPU power being underutilised and I feel sorry for my poor CPU when I hear it whirring away for 30 mins I've switched back to Podium from Thea, as the podium browser really is a massive productivity booster.

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